Arthur B. Evans

The Vehicular Utopias of Jules Verne

An important new paradigm in the history of utopian
speculation was born in 19th-century Europe during that period of dramatic
social change which we now call the Industrial Revolution. This new utopian
paradigm was the notion of unlimited mobility. In France, as
railways continued to multiply across the countryside and steamships
churned the seas to ever more distant ports of call, the utopian focus of
the French bourgeoisie of the Second Empire and Troisième République
quickly began to shift with the times. The traditional utopian “nowhere”
was soon replaced by a potential “anywhere;” the pastoral setting by the
industrial; personal ethics by competitive expansionism; and, perhaps just
as importantly, utopian ends by utopian means. Improved modes
of transportation became an apriori correlary for all real
“Progress.” The ultimate dream? Vehicles that could maximize speed (thereby
maximizing commerce, profit, and leisure) while minimizing time wasted in
transit; vehicles that could enhance personal comfort while eliminating
ennui; vehicles that could exude power, efficiency, and practicality
yet remain tasteful to the eye and soothing to the senses; vehicles that
could “go where no one has gone before” while providing a homey antidote to
the continual dépaysement of foreign milieus. And, above all,
vehicles that could be the exclusive private property of their owners who,
alone, decided their ultimate use and destination. Such was the new ideal:
facility of movement in a moving world—“Mobilis in mobili” as Captain Nemo
of the Nautilus would say.

These idealized, hyperbolic vehicles found their expression in the many
dream machines of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires—machines
which might be called “vehicular utopias” to the extent that they
satisfied such 19th century visions of transportational perfection. In
fact, to my mind, they might even be viewed as Verne’s most fully
realized utopias, in contrast to those most frequently cited by Vernian
scholars: i.e., the static, antiseptic village of Franceville portrayed
in Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum [500 Million of the
Begum]1 or Cyrus Smith’s doomed castaway
colony of L’Ile mystérieuse [Mysterious Island]2. Verne’s real utopias are vehicular: those
memorable hot-air balloons, moon capsules, helicopter airships,
submarines, trains, gypsy wagons, steam-powered RV’s, and even
propeller-driven mobile islands—all of which play such a central role in
the Voyages Extraordinaires, transporting the heroes to the far
ends of the Earth, to the bottom of the oceans, into the skies and
beyond. Only they accurately embody the new utopian values (and,
as we shall see, the ideological undertones) of the 19th-century
Industrial Age imagination.

Most often, Verne’s vehicular utopias are fully enclosed and solidly
protected from the alien—and sometimes menacing—environment through which
they travel. Witness, for example, the iron-clad Nautilus of Vingt
mille lieues sous les mers [Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea], or the aluminum space-bullet of De la Terre à la Lune
and Autour de la Lune [From the Earth to the Moon, Around the
Moon], or Robur’s unique flying vessel called Albatros in
Robur-le-Conquérant [Robur the Conqueror] whose hull and
fittings are described as follows:

[Unsized paper, whose sheets are impregnated with dextrin and starch and
then squeezed in hydraulic presses, forms a material as hard as steel.
The pulleys, rails, and wagon-wheels are made of it—much more solid than
metal wheels, and far lighter. It was this lightness and solidity that
Robur had sought in the construction of his aerial locomotive.]

Snugly insulated from the outside, such vehicles are also
sumptuously equipped on the inside: plush Victorian furniture, artworks,
dining-room, a well-stocked library, not to mention such de rigueur
items as devoted servants and a nearly inexhaustible supply of provisions
to provide the utmost in physical, emotional, and intellectual bien
être. The lavish interior of Nemo’s Nautilus is an obvious example, as
are the more compact but equally comfortable living quarters aboard
Barbicane’s moon probe, or “wagon-projectile” as the author chose to
call it. But let us also recognize another lesser-known vehicular utopia of
this sort described in Verne’s La Maison à vapeur [The Steam
House]: the huge, mechanical elephant simulacrum called the Géant
d’Acier [Steel Giant]—an all-terrain pachyderm-locomotive, pulling two
train cars featuring all the accoutrements of the famed Orient Express, and
then some:

[The first car was 15 meters long. In the front, its elegant
pilaster-supported veranda covered a wide balcony on which ten persons
could fit easily. Two windows and a door opened into the living room
that was lighted additionally by two lateral windows. The living room,
furnished with a table, a library, and soft couches all around, was
artfully decorated and walled with rich cloth. A thick rug from Smyrne
covered the floor. “Tattis,” a kind of wicker blind, hung over the
windows and they were constantly sprayed with perfumed water which
maintained a pleasant freshness in the living room and sleeping
quarters. From the ceiling hung a belt-driven “punka” which waved back
and forth automatically with the movement of the train and which,
during halts, was kept in motion manually by the servant. ...

In the rear of the living room, a second door of precious wood, facing
that of the veranda, opened into the dining room, lighted not only by
the lateral windows but also by a ceiling of frosted glass. Around the
table in the middle, eight guests could be seated. Since we were only
four, we were more than comfortable. This dining room was furnished
with buffets and credenzas filled with all the sterling silver
dinnerware, crystal glassware, and porcelaine that true English comfort
requires.]

It is important to note that each of these transportational
utopias invariably contains some sort of window, in order to allow
the heroes—“from the comfort of their own home,” as it were—to take in the
movie-like spectacle of the outside world. Quite often, these windows (like
those in the Nautilus or in Barbicane’s space-capsule) function not only to
safeguard the travellers from the dangers of the exterior environment, but
also to provide an excellent milieu transparent5 for its first-hand study. Such windows serve to
designate the boundary between the “us” and the “them,” between the secure
familiarity of the known and the implicit menace of the “Other”—whether it
be the elements, hostile natives, or dangerous flora and fauna. And they
serve also as the tangible point of contact between the reassuringly
insular world of owned and filled space and that exterior, empty space yet
to be possessed by humanity. Such windows often resemble a kind of magic
looking glass, eliciting a sense of wonder in the travellers who peer into
them, as the natural marvels of the universe—hidden to all but the most
privileged—are progressively unveiled. Witness, for example, the reactions
of Prof. Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned in this regard when looking through the
underwater portholes of the Nautilus:

[On each side, I had a window opening onto these unexplored abysses. The
darkness of the room enhanced the brightness outside, and we looked
through it as if this pure crystal were the glass wall of an immense
aquarium...

Awestruck, we were down on our elbows in front of these large windows,
and none of us had yet broken this stupified silence when Conseil said:
“You wanted to see, my friend Ned. Well now, you see!”]

More importantly, these mobile mansions epitomize the ultimate
bourgeois dream of taking along all of one’s possessions when
travelling—a revealing example of technological wish-fulfillment for
bourgeois materialism, making these fictional conveyances a kind of moving
microcosm of an entire way of life. In the words of Jacques Noiray in his
study titled Le Romancier et la Machine:

[This dream of “travelling with all of one’s home,” illustrated forty
years later by the famous automobile caravan of Raymond Roussel, all the
heroes of Jules Verne were tantalized by it, all his engineers
materialized it, and one would be at a loss to understand the subliminal
functions of the machine in the Voyages Extraordinaires if one did
not see that the machine is first and foremost a house—electric or steam,
of course—but possessing all the characteristics and all the comfort of
the bourgeois home at the end of the nineteenth century.]

These imaginary vehicles exemplify (or, even better,
encapsulate) two of the most fundamental properties of the traditional
utopia: i.e., autonomy and comfort. But one might also view
them as a richly symbolic expression of an even more ubiquitous Vernian
obsession: the impulse toward (en)closure. Roland Barthes was the
first to call attention this seemingly omnipresent characteristic of
Verne’s fictional world, saying:

[Verne put together a kind of self-referential cosmogony which has its
own categories, its own time and space, its own richness, and even its
own existential principle.

This principle seems to me to be the continual gesture of enclosure. In
Verne’s works, the imagination of travel corresponds to the exploration
of enclosed space...

Verne was a fanatic of plenitude. He never stopped completing the world
and furnishing it, making it full like an egg... Verne never tried to
expand the world... He always tried to constrict it, to people it, to
reduce it to an enclosed and familiar space in which Man could then
comfortably inhabit.]

But Verne’s fixation with structures of (en)closure and
comfort is much more than just one writer’s personal bourgeois fantasy,
however typical it might be of this particular 19th-century social class.
More importantly, such a preoocupation goes to the heart of the educational
project of the Voyages Extraordinaires themselves as a fictional
series. This collection of novels was conceived by Verne’s publisher Hetzel
to be an encyclopedic compendium of the world’s scientific knowledge, books
which would educate the scientifically-illiterate French public via
easy-reading and entertaining adventure stories:

[Its goal is, in fact, to outline all the geographical, geological,
physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science, and to
recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the
universe.]

Hence, the explicit (if over-ambitious) social goal of the
Voyages Extraordinaires themselves—i.e., to be a “user-friendly”
instrument for transmitting the (supposedly) circumscribed totality of
human knowledge—inherently implies these same utopian presuppositions:
thematic (en)closure, generic autonomy, reader comfort, etc. This, of
course, in addition to their ideological role as a highly popular vehicle
for proselytizing the doctrines of Positivism—which, it might be argued, is
itself a kind of utopian philosophy.

But if the social goal of this series of novels was the transmission of a
fixed body of knowledge, the didactic means to this end was the fictional
voyage. And it is here, as mentioned, that we find Verne’s real
innovation, adding an entirely new dimension to the traditional utopian
elements of (en)closure, autonomy, and comfort: Verne’s vehicular utopias
are not only self-contained and homey, they are also supremely
mobile—rapidly transporting their passengers to ever-changing
locales and continually providing them with new, exotic vistas to
contemplate and to learn from. Moreover, they also most often serve as
ambulatory cabinets de travail—fulfilling the needs not only of
the body and the spirit, but the intellect as well—by providing the
Vernian scientists an unparalleled platform for their ongoing work of
mapping the universe and uncovering Nature’s deepest secrets.

Finally, in addition to their utopian characteristics of (en)closure and
comfort, their autonomy, their mobility, their role as purveyor of new
knowledge, and their being (as one protagonist of La Maison à
vapeur described it) “le dernier mot du Progrès en matière de
voyage!” [“Progress’s last word in matters of travel!”]10, Verne’s extraordinary vehicles are also
portrayed as technological objets d’art. They act as fictional
stepping-stones for the reader’s imagination to venture out not only into
new dimensions of physical space, but also into new patterns of aesthetic
appreciation. The mechanical device itself is viewed as a thing of
Beauty, carrying with it its own criteria of form and function: sleekness
of design, precision of movement, strength of material, straightness of
line, amplitude of effect, etc. The poetic function of these vehicles is
further underscored by the fact that they are never portrayed as economic
entities (as in Zola’s work, for instance): they neither create jobs nor
replace them; they produce no “surplus value” in the Marxist sense; they
do not manufacture commodities; they are not bought and sold. They serve
only to make the impossible possible, the fantastic real, and the
unlikely believable. Their primary raison d’être is to create for
the reader an imaginary inner space from which to explore, alongside
Verne’s fictional heroes, the outermost boundaries of the real.

But what of the ideological implications of Verne’s many dream machines?
In many ways, they constitute a utopia turned inside out. For
example, although they are self-contained and self-sufficient, these
Vernian vehicles do not exist for themselves. They are not examples of
L’Art pour l’art. On the contrary, they are meant to be
used: not only for the aesthetic pursuits of tourism, but also—and
more fundamentally—for the conquest and subjugation of a natural order
which must be inventoried for the material profit of humankind. In the
words of one of heroes of La Maison à vapeur:

[“Man, simple inhabitant of the Earth...even nailed to its crust, he can
discover all of its innermost secrets.”

“He can, and he must!” replied Banks. “All that’s within the limits of
the possible must and will be accomplished. Then, when Man has nothing
more to learn of the globe that he inhabits...”

“He will disappear along with the sphere that has no more mysteries for
him,” answered Captain Hod.

“Not so!” replied Banks. “He will then reign as master over it, and
bring out its very best.”]

Viewed from this vantage-point, Verne’s vehicular utopias
reveal a new and different identity. They are the imaginative by-products
of a factory-driven, positivistic notion of unlimited Progress—scientific,
industrial, and material. And, as such, they constitute an effective
fictional tool for the expression and popularization of the latter’s
ultimate goals: global hegemony and domination. In other words, these
memorable technological extrapolations in the Voyages
Extraordinaires function both as the representation and the social
instrument of a kind of utopian imperialism.

Further, the narratological structure of these texts tends to
reverse the traditional dialectic between utopian and non-utopian
protagonists. The narrative viewpoint associated with Verne’s
extraordinary vehicles, for instance, always moves from the utopian (and
reader-shared) interior—identified as “us”—outwards toward
the “real” (and reader-distanced) exterior—identified as “them.” Although
the Vernian machine itself serves to bring the two into contact (which
is, after all, its primary role within the narrative), the psychological
and social barriers separating the “us” from the “them”—albeit now
reversed—are nevertheless scrupulously maintained. There can be no
contamination from the outside: organic or atmospheric, ideological or
cultural. The ideal utopian interior—not only the luxe, calme, et
volupté, but also the bourgeois value system, the positivist agenda,
the pedagogical imperative—must be always kept pure and undiluted.

If the inside integrity of Verne’s vehicular utopia is somehow
compromised, immediate death to the machine (and to the utopian setting)
will almost always ensue. The disappearance of the Nautilus into the
Maëlstrom which concludes Vingt mille lieues sous les Mers is the
direct result of Ned Land’s ill-fated presence aboard; the Géant
d’Acier ultimately explodes when abandoned by its makers and overrun
by bandits; the floating paradise of Ile à hélice [Propeller
Island] is torn apart by rival political factions from within; in
Maître du Monde [Master of the World], the growing insanity
of the once-heroic Robur dooms both himself and his unique airship in a
lightning storm; and the list goes on.... To survive, the Vernian
vehicular utopia must remain hermetically sealed and inviolate—from
“them” on the outside, from ideological contamination, and (ironically)
from its own author’s need to destroy it at the conclusion of the
narrative in order to conform to the dictates of realist verisimilitude.

In summary, then, Jules Verne’s many “vehicular utopias” throughout the
Voyages Extraordinaires give new meaning to MacLuan’s well-known
phrase “the medium is the message.” And the message therein is one that
is very mixed, both in its scope and in its implications.12